SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution
this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be
reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here
that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.

After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for Science and
Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the
eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the
country. Pushing a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution, the institute
has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a
confrontation between biology and religion.

Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even
exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that
alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums "so
people can understand what the debate is about."

Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White
House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for
nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life's origins known as
intelligent design.

Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock
of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting
Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.

Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted,
poll-tested message, lively Web logs - and millions of dollars from foundations run by
prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard
Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired
the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.

"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the
center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited
by Discovery after he protested a professor's being punished for criticizing Darwin in
class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture."

For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan
conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities -
and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his
organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek,
Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute's signature issue
precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.

As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges
Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be
explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences.
While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a
faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and
science societies as untestable in laboratories.

Entering the Public Policy Sphere

From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an institutional
home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000
per year to 50 researchers since the science center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits
are 50 books on intelligent design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity
or Crossway, and two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But
even as the institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent design, it
has staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states and school boards
simply to include criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually teach intelligent
design.

Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and evolution
has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National
Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical
number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile
developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York
Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting
design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of
Education in May to require criticism of evolution.

These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge
Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its
cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of
nature."

President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind, also helped,
as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum standards. Ohio, New Mexico and
Minnesota have embraced the institute's "teach the controversy" approach; Kansas
is expected to follow suit in the fall.

Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as a
clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning creationism from
curriculums. But the institute's approach is more nuanced, scholarly and politically adept
than its Bible-based predecessors in the century-long battle over biology.

A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and
mainstream groups - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year,
including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary - and asserting itself on
questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.

Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed, devout and
determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the moral crusader and former
drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some leaders have ties to movement mainstays
like Focus on the Family. All but a few in the organization are Republicans, though these
include moderates drawn by the institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on
nonideological topics like technology.

But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the institute is
starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to distance itself from lawsuits
and legislation that seek to force schools to add intelligent design to curriculums,
placing it in the awkward spot of trying to promote intelligent design as a robust
frontier for scientists but not yet ripe for students.

The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to Holocaust
deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's Cascadia project, which
focuses on regional transportation and is the recipient of the large grant from the Gates
Foundation, created its own Web site to ensure an individual identity.

"All ideas go through three stages - first they're ignored, then they're attacked,
then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the institute's vice
president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're somewhere in the
attack."

Origins of an Institute

Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis, the
institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in 1792. Mr.
Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's anti-civil-rights
campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a liberal Republican on the
Seattle City Council and candidate for governor, but moved to the right in the Reagan
administration, where he served as director of the Census Bureau and worked for Edwin
Meese III.

In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Meyer, who
was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning a biologist yanked from
a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design. About a year later, over dinner at the
Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and George Gilder, Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate
and his writing partner, discovered parallel theories of mind over materialism in their
separate studies of biology and economics.

"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,' " Dr.
Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation, there was a
common metaphysic in these two ideas."

That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a representative of the
Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange County, Calif., who had previously given a
small grant to the institute and underwritten an early conclave of intelligent design
scholars. Dr. Meyer, who had grown friendly enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young
son in science, recalled being asked, "What could you do if you had some financial
backing?"

So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons and a
smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports organizations "committed
to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to its Web site, the institute's
Center for Science and Culture was born.

"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J.
Larson, the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes Monkey
Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in part because of its drift to
the right. "The institute was living hand-to-mouth. Here was an academic, credible
activity that involved funders. It interested conservatives. It brought in money."

Support From Religious Groups

The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get
harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on www.guidestar.org, a
Web site that collects data on foundations, showed its grants and gifts jumped to $4.1
million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997, the most recent and oldest years available. The
records show financial support from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with
explicitly religious missions.

There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose Web site
describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the doctrines of
evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation in Virginia, run by Mark
Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice president: the initials stand for Ad
Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To the greater glory of God," which Pope John
Paul II etched in the corner of all his papers.

And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says it was
created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by evangelical and
missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million between 1999 and 2003.

By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the Ahmansons, who
have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million since its inception and now
underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual operations. Mr. Ahmanson also sits on
Discovery's board.

The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan Foundation,
based in Chattanooga, Tenn.

"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive
director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science. Darwin was
about a metaphysical view of the world."

The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the
Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in
2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates Foundation, said the money was "exclusive
to the Cascadia project" on regional transportation.

But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt Foundation, based
here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as well as the John Templeton
Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site defines it as devoted to pursuing "new
insights between theology and science."

Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an e-mail
message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell," saying,
"I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything
at Discovery today."

Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, said he
had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999 for a conference
in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics. "They're political - that
for us is problematic," Mr. Harper said. While Discovery has "always claimed to
be focused on the science," he added, "what I see is much more focused on public
policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth."

For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski could not
find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called "a standard
academic salary" of $40,000 a year.

"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr.
Dembski, whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago,
one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and a master's of divinity from
Princeton Theological Seminary.

Money for Teachers and Students

Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its $9.3 million
on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often just paying
universities to release professors from some teaching responsibilities so that they can
ponder intelligent design. Over those nine years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field
research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in
paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy.

The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group, including
David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who described his only
religion to be "having a good time all the time," and Jonathan Wells, a member
of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who once wrote in an essay,
"My prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."

Their credentials - advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the University of
Texas, the University of California - are impressive, but their ideas are often ridiculed
in the academic world.

"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in - no one else is,"
Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his colleagues at
Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most of my colleagues. It's
not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do." Other than Dr. Berlinski, most
fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist Christians, though they insist their
work is serious science, not closet creationism.

"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I
don't know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask myself the tough
questions."

Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a diversionary tactic
by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and they want to talk about
us," Dr. Meyer said.

But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had grown
increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a religious
focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian conservatism," he said.

That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page outline of a
five-year plan for the science center that originated as a fund-raising pitch but was soon
posted on the Internet by critics.

"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist
worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic
convictions," the document says. Among its promises are seminars "to encourage
and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support the faith, as well as to
'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."

One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to act on
their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That, according to institute
officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new conservative majority on the Kansas Board
of Education shocked the nation - and their potential allies here at the institute - by
dropping all references to evolution from the state's science standards.

"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was silly,
outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director of the science
center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999 move in Kansas from newspaper
accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're going to be stigmatized with what everyone
does if we don't make our position clear.' "

Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which
endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum - so long as criticism of Darwin
is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian conservatives but also appealed to
Republican moderates and, under the First Amendment banner, much of the public (71 percent
in a Discovery-commissioned Zogby poll in 2001 whose results were mirrored in newspaper
polls).

"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation science
people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science
Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present themselves as being more
mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light."

A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act,
whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute's
talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help
students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy,"
was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.

Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles in pushing
the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy" approach and
helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year, they successfully urged
changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for evolution, and they have been
consulted in numerous other cases as school districts or states consider changing their
approach to biology.

But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly frustrated as his
supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent design.

John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based in Kansas,
said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources to "lead the
movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They want to
avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the focus on the
science," he said.

Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did not support
mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was not yet developed
enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the institute has opposed legislation
in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to
follow Ohio's lead.

"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the
right," Dr. West said.

Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.

"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart whether
it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people keep knocking away at
it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish those people."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times,
Nastional, of Sunday, August 21, 2005.